The invention relates to a safety car seat or stroller and particularly a child seat mountable to a stroller in a latched fashion or detachable from the stroller.
Safety car seats or stroller seats that are fastenable to strollers have recently been in great demand. They allow sleeping infants or young children to be carried from the cars to the strollers, or from the strollers to the cars conveniently without interrupting the sleeping of the infants or children.
Numerous proposals and designs of this nature have been disclosed in the prior art. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,861,105 to Barron C. Merten, et al. discloses an xe2x80x9cInfant car seat mountable on a grocery cart.xe2x80x9d which has an infant car seat coupled with a handle located at a rear end to trigger a spring-controlled hook. When removing the infant car seat from the grocery cart, the handle is pulled to release the hook, and the infant car seat may be disengaged from the cart and taken away.
However Merten""s design requires the user to grasp the car seat with one hand, and to pull the handle with other hand. In general, it is difficult for people to balance the car seat with only one hand. Removing the car seat directly from the grocery cart with one hand while the child is still in the car seat is risky. It would be safer to remove the child from the car seat first, then remove the car seat from the cart. However, doing so would wake the child if s/he is sleeping.
Another similar concept is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,201,535 to Hitoshi Kato, et al. titled xe2x80x9cFolding stroller with detachable seatxe2x80x9d. It has a foldable body coupled with a latch mechanism. Users must move a handle located below the mechanism to release the seat from the latch mechanism before removing the seat. As the handle is located at a distance from the body where user""s hand has to grasp, it is inconvenient or even risky for one person to maneuver the handle with one hand and to remove the seat body with the other hand. A similar design appears in U.S. Pat. No. 5,203,577 to Kato, et al. However, it does not offer solution to overcome the problem set forth above.
There are also many approaches being proposed to couple an infant carrier to a stroller. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,798 to John Walters, et al. titled xe2x80x9cChild stroller and infant carrier systemxe2x80x9d has a U-shape safety bar with a recess in its center located on the infant carrier, and a latch in front of the infant carrier for users to selectively couple the carrier to the stroller. When a user moves the latch, the infant carrier may be released from the U-shaped bar. Hence, a user may move the latch with one hand and remove the carrier by the handle with the other hand, which is more convenient.
Nevertheless, for lager size structures, such as those to couple a safety car seat to a stroller, or to couple a child seat to a stroller, there are usually no handles for users"" hands to grasp. John Walters"" design is thus inapplicable. Other alternatives and structures have to be considered.
The primary object of the invention is to change the structure of safety car seats, infant carriers or stroller seats, to make them capable of coupling with strollers, and also to make them easily removable from the strollers.
In the embodiments of the invention, a user may grasp two sides of the child seat (or infant carrier) with both hands, and press a pushbutton located adjacent to the palm to separate the child seat from the stroller, so that the child seat may be easily removed.
The invention provides a latch mechanism that includes at least a pushbutton and a latch block. The pushbuttons are located on both sides of the safety car seat or stroller seat to allow users to grasp with both hands. Through a transmission mechanism, the pressing force and action will be transmitted to the latch block and turn the latch block to release the latched engagement.
The foregoing, as well as additional objects, features and advantages of the invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawings are only for reference and illustrative purposes, and thus are not intended to limit the scope of the invention.